It's Always Ourselves We Find In The Sea

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

I dumped the spent grounds into the harbor. Fresh pot on the stove. You’ve got to unplug one thing to plug in another on this ship. I ground the beans in the dark.

The harbor’s especially still and quiet this morning. About as peaceful as a place surrounded by cranes and smokestacks can be. Soon enough the workers will change all that.

For some reason the church bells are at their most intricate and melodious at 6:15 every morning. Through the darkness, across the water, I imagine a giant sitting cross-legged in front of a wall of bronze cymbals, flicking them perfectly with the tops of his knobbled fingers.

Once the sun has beat down for an hour or two I’ll be sanding and varnishing the bowsprit and capping rail of this old boat.

Somewhere in that old hull of my heart I always knew I’d end up on a boat. I kept that knowing in the same part of the bilge where all my dreams are stowed away. I’m fairly certain there’s a trumpet in there, along with a few books, a jar of honey, and a shovel for digging up clams. And that great, big, waltzing sea has always been there as well.

Now I find myself drinking coffee out of a steel mug on a softly rocking harbor. My bedroom windows are two portholes and I sleep just below the waterline. I’ve got a beard because there’s no mirror to shave by and I’m wearing a big coat cause it’s the middle of winter. Just out the galley window I can see all of the cables, rope, and turnbuckles for the masts. The standing rigging is all that I know and the running rigging is all I’m searching for. You need both to sail.

I was searching for something when I came across that forgotten hatch, and when I opened it up the sea poured out, and now, with the coffee almost finished, the sky turning blue, the voices of the workers coming closer, I can say for certain that here sits a salty, almost-sailor who is waltzing with a dream.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

So for the past month and a half or so I and a few others on my crew have been on the 'Mast Team.' The Mast Team was assigned the tremendous task of rehabilitating our two wooden masts: the main mast and the mizzen mast. I could go into a large amount of detail here describing this enormous job, but I will refrain from delving too deeply, as really I am just writing this to set up a funny story that occurred a few days ago.

But to give you a bit of context about what this job looked like, as I know at least some of you are actually interested in this project and not only the clumsy meanderings of my mind: Our main mast is a single 113' tall Douglas Fir tree (Pseudotsuga menzesii---no I did not need to look that up), and at one point was the tallest mast in the Mediterranean Sea. Our mizzen mast is about 90' tall and is made of many planks of Douglas Fir wood all glued together. They are both currently laying on wooden blocks at the shipyard and have not been mounted on the boat in over three years. The main mast had a few very rotten sections which required cutting out all of the rot and replacing it with new wood (not as simple as it sounds, I can assure you). The mizzen mast had to be completely taken apart, board by board, and many pieces needed to be entirely replaced while other planks only needed to be repaired, and then re-planed, re-glued, re-shaped, re-etc. All of this woodwork gave me the opportunity to be introduced to different power tools, such as large, antiquated planers and table saws, and other such appendage and phalange-removing machinery. It seemed for a time to be a job that would never end, until now, when we are finally at a stage where we can begin sanding, varnishing, re-attaching all of the rigging, and hopefully within the next ten days to two weeks will put those babies back on the ship!

It has been a monumental (emphasis on the mental) task to get where we are now, and suffice it to say that that small description of the job does it zero justice. But that's alright, a blog can really give no more than a glimpse anyway, and we now have sufficient meat to deliver the funny story.

If you don't know, as I didn't until a month ago when I began working with them, what a turnbuckle is, here is a photo of one:

Photo Coutesy Of: tooleeturnbuckle.com

They are used to attach the cables (or shrouds) that hold the mast in place to the side of the ship, and to adjust the tension on these cables. I was put in charge of figuring out how many turnbuckles we need so that we could order them. The U-shaped part with the bolt going through it, on the bottom of the turnbuckle in the above photograph, is called the 'jaw', and the oval-shaped part is the 'eye.' While perusing the catalog with all of the turnbuckles in it I came across what I was looking for, and then had to make a decision regarding the specifics of my order, because sometimes you need turnbuckles with two jaws, or two eyes, or with both a jaw and an eye as is shown above. This is the funny part. Here were my choices according to the catalog:

Jaw and Jaw
Eye and Eye
Eye and Jaw

Now this is really only going to be funny to those of you that grew up listening to as much reggae music as I did, but now go ahead and say those three above choices with a Jamaican accent.

So I and I took it upon my and my self to order turteen a dem combeenation 'I and Jah' turnbuckle, so now we and we can hoist dem sails to the most high and begin our mission a justice to help protect me bredren and sistren that I mon call dem coral reef dem, seen?

Friday, November 27, 2009

To all of my people in the States: happy hangovers, happy post-turkey gorging guilt, and a happy Black Friday to you. Or if you happen to come from the thick-skinned bubble that surrounds the Bay Area: happy regrets about thinking Tofurkey was actually worth the trouble, and happy "Buy Nothing Day."

It seems likely to me (as likely as the next thing, and far more likely than many others) that our dear bodies are but a home for our true essences, and that these essences remain after the temporal body ceases to. Whoa there! What is this far-outedness, and why are you blogging about it, man?! Well, allow me to explain. Lately I have been living a life that requires the use of my body much more than usual, and so my thoughts have been naturally tending towards ruminating on this most useful vessel that I spend my days at the shipyard working with, and then these ruminations usually bring me to: "But what am I really?"

Is the rough skin on my elbow (which in all truth is called the 'weenis'---look it up. I know, wonderful right? ["Hey, would you mind giving my weenis a little tug? Please?"] Sorry...) as much "me" as my heart, mind or face? Is this body and the "I" that I associate with it truly all that I am? And will death really just come along one day and snuff the whole thing out? Poof! The thought of there being nothing after death does not so much frighten me as it just rings with utter absurdity in my ears (and in my essence). It feels quite clear to me that my body is a very helpful instrument that gives my essence, my spirit if you will, a chance at a physical experience. It also seems likely that a great deal is lost when so much energy is pushed into such a confined space (id est: forgetting that we are greater than this one life in this one body). Part of the importance of actually believing in the importance of the self, and the body as an integral part of that self, could likely be that if we embraced the notion that we were far more than just these bags of bones we would perhaps forget to feed ourselves or to participate in the game of helping to create other bodies for other spirits to tuck into, like hermit crabs. Okay great, but where is this all going? Bear with me, here is where it becomes applicable to the body that calls itself Sam Keck Scott working at a Maltese Shipyard. Let's begin a new paragraph, shall we?

There have been many times in my life when I have been hugely impressed by my species and all of the things it has been able to create. On many occasions I have walked through cities and with neck craned upwards have gawked at the massive buildings that people, plain old people, have shot into the sky. Fiber optic cables stretching across the ocean floors. Traffic lights, bridges, postal delivery, cell phones! There is this whole massive infrastructure that is happening non-stop and it is keeping our human world spinning, and it works! It somehow works. My musings of late have made me recognize that while all of this is going on, this highly functioning system, and I am using it and completely reliant upon it, I in no way have contributed to it. People have made all of this stuff, but I have never made anything. So here we all are standing on Planet Earth with our spirits living within bodies, and why? Well, to put it quite simply: so we can move shit around. Our ecstatic spirits are all too familiar with endless, all-knowing expansiveness, but from time to time they like to make a little trip downwards, take up residence, and be able to move shit around for awhile. It can be useful on occasion to actually leave a mark, to make something, to push something over, to explore the physical aspects of the universe. And finally, where this actually applies to me, and my current experiences: New paragraph? Nah. I am finally contributing! That is how it applies to me. I wake up every morning, head to the shipyard, and spend my whole day purposefully and strategically moving shit around, and eventually through my and our crew's efforts there will be a beautiful ship named Mir that floats the world's seas. An actual product that our efforts brought forth into the world; a giant, steel, fruit of our labors. And by contributing I am only referring to one aspect of our physical potential, and that is the actual construction of things using our bodies. I have been contributing in other ways my entire life, as our bodies also give us the capacity to share ideas in a three dimensional world, to shake our booties, to experience enjoyment, satisfaction, pain and fathomless love.

When I imagine death I see the body lying still and with the release of life comes an elliptical burst of opalescent energy that charges outwards in all directions. It goes everywhere, mingles with everything and knows all (better than Jesus!). Eventually when all of that blissful energy decides it has some earthbound business to attend to, it begins scuttling about, looking for some human syngamy to give it that perfect new shell to go move some more shit around. Or something like that...

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Big birthday wishes to Chevy Chase, Sigourney Weaver, Jesse Jackson and my favorite of the bunch: the recently departed David Carradine. You are all celebrated! That's why you're called celebrities...

Each morning I wake up at 5:20 AM (except for the Lord's Day of course, when 5:20 AM is closer to bed time than it is to rise and shine time) and go out back of our apartment to stretch in the dark. As I stretch, I ponder with great urgency the hugely important question of: "mate' or coffee?" And these days mate' has been winning out big time. So once through stretching I go and sit on our second story balcony where I can see the messenger clouds shouting to everyone with pink-tipped exclamations that that big lion's-maned sun is coming to bully us through another day again. And while all of this celestial madness is unwinding over the Mediterranean Sea, I sit, just some guy who currently spends his days working at a Maltese shipyard, and I pour myself a mate'. And it's marvelous. Sometimes it's hard to remember that I spent the majority of this year in South America, and it can be equally hard to remember while living with nine people that I am a person who normally craves and seeks out lots of solitude, but out there on that balcony, while drinking a delicious mate', I am back in touch with these truths, and I am quite pleased. I toted four kilos of yerba to Malta, and I'm already well into kilo number two. Uh oh.

And a funny little travel story: On my first morning in London, over a month ago now, after sleeping for nearly twelve hours straight, I woke up and ventured out into the unknown streets to seek out a much needed cup of coffee (coffee won the argument that morning). I skulked around my hotel's neighborhood, nearly getting creamed by every car that whizzed past me coming from the unexpected side of the road, and feeling slightly vampireous in the oppressive, un-caffeinated daylight, until I finally discovered a coffee shop. "Large coffee please." "White or black, sir?" Perplexed, I stared at this nice British lady and finally uttered: "You guys have white coffee here?" To which she very annoyedly responded: "Room for cream?" And I quite smoothly replied with: "Oh! Yeah, just a little bit white for me, please..."

Whoopsies. Well, how else does one learn the ways of the world without throwing themselves headlong into new parts of it and getting embarrassed tremendously en-route to figuring out how other people in other places do things? Part of our birthright upon being spawned on a particular planet should most definitely be a feeling of home no matter where we are, but unfortunately this feeling of world citizenship seems to have been seized from us with the creation of political boundaries, cultures and greediness. So to reclaim yourself a citizen of this humongously tiny Planet Earth means a monumental effort to see as much as possible, get into the heart and eyes of a place, fill your pockets with the parts you adore and take them with you (i.e. mate' from Argentina to the Mediterranean), be a regionalist (when in Rome...), order incorrectly, get laughed at, fumble through language barriers, and always remembering that you're just as stellar a hominid as the rest of 'em. Because when on Planet Earth, do as the Earthlings do, and yes, that most certainly includes salamanders, lichens, narwhals, politicians and river otters...

Post-Script: We spent the past two days moving by hand 18.5 tons of steel ballast blocks back into the bilge of our ship. There is no doubt tonight that I am the inhabitant of a body, and that this body of mine is a soar one. We also painted the majority of the boat's interior, and tomorrow begin sand-blasting and painting the outside. Oh yeah, things are happening around here, and it feels damn good.

The last time that I was under the weight of maintaining a blog I was in Peru, Planet Earth, and now that I am in Malta, Planet Earth I am finding it to be as difficult as ever to whittle out a little piece of time to reflect, organize and share my experiences on a computer screen. This is the first day since arriving in Malta one month ago that I have had a day off and not been hungover (don't worry mom, it's only my fifth day off, and sometimes hitting the town is a spiritual necessity when you're working six days a week...), so I thought I had better take advantage of the time and clarity and finally get down to writing about month one of this grand adventure.

Our boat Mir, named for the Russian Space Station, is currently sitting on a dry dock at the Bezzina Shipyard in Malta. The boat was formerly known as Marilou, and at this point we still lovingly refer to her as Marilou at least half the time, because in the state she's currently in, which I'll get to shortly, she is still very much in a transitional phase from her old self, to her new incarnation of Mir. One could go so far as to say Marilou is a caterpillar, the dry dock a heavy coating of chrysalis, our crew an eager team of metamorphosis catalyzers, and shortly a mammoth butterfly by the name of Mir will emerge to float and glide across the seas. One could go so far as to say all of that, but that would be silly. But assuming I was willing to entertain such a metaphor I would continue it with: for now, the chrysalis is quite thick, and Mir is still very much dormant within her cocoon.

We pulled Mir-ilou out of the water and put her on the dry dock three and a half weeks ago. If you don't know what a dry dock is, or how it works, I will quickly explain it: The shipyard has a few gigantic concrete structures that have approximately 20 foot high walls on two sides, and are open on the other two sides. The length of the dry dock is 200 plus feet. The entire structure is hollow, and using pumps can either be filled with water, or emptied so that it is full of air only, which makes it buoyant. Following me so far? So three and a half weeks ago they filled one of these dry docks with water, and it sunk beneath the surface of the harbor, and we pulled our boat over the submerged platform where she was secured to a bunch of metal towers and then the water was pumped back out of the dry dock, and she came back up above the surface of the harbor, where she now sits, completely out of the water, and about five feet up in the air, so that we can work on the inside and outside of her hull. Here's a photo to help you visualize:

Make more sense now? All of the water you can still see drained off, and she is now resting just above that dry platform.

Here is how she currently looks on the dry dock with scaffolding built all around her.

Our goal was to be on dry dock for no more than three weeks, but week three came and went last Wednesday, and now according to the shipyard workers we will be back in the water on October 17th at the earliest. It is quite expensive to rent the space on a dry dock, so we were all well prepared for a lot of very hard work once she was up to get her back in the water as fast as possible. And hard work it has certainly been, and unfortunately it is out of our control when she gets back in the water because the steel work, sand blasting and painting that still needs to happen on dry dock is not ours, but the shipyard's to do, and we are now very impatiently waiting on them.

Marilou is in very rough shape, but she is also extremely charming and beautiful, and her potential shines right on through the rust, holes, corrosion and rot. The first three weeks of work were almost entirely dedicated to getting all of the old concrete out of the hull. So there we were, hunkered down in the belly of the boat day in and day out, chipping ancient concrete from between the steel ribs of Marilou. Hammers, chisels, jackhammers, air chisels, needle guns...Clean, clean clean...More chipping. As we got down through more and more layers I began expecting that I would come across some old clay pots, or trilobite fossils. Once all of the steel in the hull was exposed we could see what needed to be cut out and replaced, and for the past week plus the shipyard workers have been cutting huge holes in our poor Marilou. So basically this entire first month has been almost exclusively demolition (not only concrete removal, but walls, old tanks, pipes, refrigeration, an old, broken, two-ton Rolls-Royce Diesel engine, and more), but we are just now finally standing on the cusp of building her back up, which I imagine will do wonders for our group morale, to finally see progress and improvement.

Malta is a very strange place. A little speck of a country in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea (I can finally spell Mediterranean correctly on my first try just about every time now), that has a tremendously long and complex history, so is covered in old buildings, forts and ancient temples, but is also very much trying to keep up with the rest of the world, so for every old stone structure there is a huge crane erecting a new high-rise hotel. It is very often ugly; dirty, overdeveloped, smoggy, but then suddenly surprises you with a spectacular moment of beauty; an old stone church, a harbor full of brightly painted fishing boats, or a walkway spangled with nice restaurants and cafe's overlooking the Mediterranean (got it again!) Sea. Nothing happens quickly in Malta, which oftentimes is an endearing quality in a place, but when your boat is on dry dock and it's costing a fortune to keep it there it is far from cute when it takes a week to service a power-tool, and even longer to find an open market to buy vegetables to feed the crew. In many ways Malta reminds me of Mexico, in that it is very unorganized, but somehow there is order in the chaos, and everything takes just a little (or a LOT) longer than it necessarily needs to. Our latest example of Malta being Malta was when a very long awaited for pallet of paint arrived from Singapore, which just the waiting process for this particular pallet is a story in itself, but once it finally made it to Malta, and we were informed of its arrival, and greatly relieved to finally have our paint, we were then told that we could not retrieve our goods because in the same container as our paint was discovered an illegal shipment of cigarettes. We then had to wait many many more days to get our paint because the Maltese customs office was...We have no idea. Searching through our paint cans for cigarettes? Huffing our paint thinner while smoking the illegal cigarettes? Who knows, but it sure was the icing on a very frustrating and comical Maltese Cake, because when in Malta you are forced to have your cake, and eat the whole damn thing, whether you like it or not, meaning you are at the mercy of the Maltese pace, and that's all there is to it. Adapt, or have a frustration-induced brain aneurysm. Oh, and it's also covered in extremely easy to pronounce names such as: Marsaxlokk, Mqabba and Ta'xbiex, which is helpful with navigation.

There is so much to say, as there always is when every single piece of life is new and unusual, but geez, this has already been a really long blog update. I didn't even mention the people who are my new apartment mates, co-workers and family. Just know that they are a wonderful bunch. That's all for this one, but hopefully now that I have gotten this thing somewhat up to date I can do a better job of keeping up with it, and not allow myself to get buried again and again beneath weeks of noteworthy experiences.